Claire Blyth on Why PR Still Matters in the Age of AI

0:06Katy Cowan:PR has always been about telling stories and building trust. But for those of us in the creative industries, the world we're trying to tell those stories in is shifting faster than ever. Traditional media is shrinking, algorithms keep moving, the damn goalposts, and AI is changing how our work gets discovered. On top of that, clients and audiences are demanding more, more impact, more meaning, more proof that the work we do actually cuts through. It's a lot of pressure. So how do we adapt? How do creatives and agencies get seen and heard in this new landscape? And what skills are going to matter most if we want to stay relevant?

0:44Katy Cowan:To get into all of this, I'm joined by the brilliant Claire Blythe, founder of Red Setter, the global PR agency that champions design and has helped some of the world's top creative studios build their reputations. Claire has been right in the thick of these changes and she knows what works, what doesn't and what's coming next. In this episode, we talk about what the actual decline of traditional means for design and creativity, why the rise of niche platforms and creators is a huge opportunity, super positive, and how AI is reshaping the way stories are told and discovered. And most importantly, we explore why even in an AI first world, yeah, sorry, I said that kind of term, human connection, trust and relationships are still the secret sauce that will make your work stand out.

1:32Katy Cowan:If you're a creative, this one's for you, whether you're running your own studio, freelancing or working in-house. There's loads here about how to cut through the noise, build your own reputation and make sure your work gets the recognition it deserves.

1:49Katy Cowan:This season of the Creative Boom podcast is proudly sponsored by James Cropper, the last mill standing in Britain for premium coloured paper. Its new colour source range puts designers first, giving you direct access to 50 stunning shades in a range of weights and textures straight from the mill. Incredible colour, crafted in the Lake District and delivered straight to your door. Discover the paper that brings your ideas to life

2:25Katy Cowan:Claire, if you think back to when you first started in PR, what feels completely unrecognisable about the industry today? It's got to be just, I mean, the overall shift with AI and how people are finding things. And people, so when I first started in PR, people really did sit down and read Design Week and Creative Review and newspapers and all the stuff like that. I don't know to a certain extent people do sit down and read things today but it's just it's the majority really isn't I don't do that particularly I try to over weekend and try to actually focus on it but you sort of grab bits off your phone and grab bits when you're sat on my laptop and that change in behavior has changed everything really it really has I mean I remember when I started out in journalism it was you always had all of the morning papers on the desk you would obviously go through them to make sure you were covering everything but then that habit um shifted when I moved into PR and you would have all the papers and and try and find clippings of your your uh yeah absolutely you know your media coverage did we get that travel deal in the sun and um all this kind of thing and yeah now I I haven't worked in a PR agency for a very long time do you still get those printed papers or is that long gone we get a few we get we still probably have subscriptions that arrive probably about five or ten a month or something like that but the majority I mean we still sit down every Monday we sit down as a company and go through anything that's happened in the news since Friday that our clients could comment on that sort of show their messaging and every morning every team looks through the news and sees what there is to comment on.

4:12But it's looking online. It's looking, yeah, you know, it's doing Google searches and asking chat GPT. And although I do find generative AI isn't that good at that at the moment. If I say, tell me some big brand stories that have happened in the past few days, brand business news, it tends to come up with stuff that was a year old. And it's always I was saying, oh, my God, how did I miss that? And then realize it was a year ago.

4:35Katy Cowan:Yeah, that's the problem with it, isn't it? That's the only thing I found about it that's frustrating it's not picking up on the very current aspects it's yeah copying rather than than leading um but it is changing everything like the shift is so fast that I can imagine that'll be something that comes in what in the next 12 months it's got to be hasn't it because it's got to get a lot better at that I still think and I still believe that the essential thing is that people still want to read really good information. I think generally that's produced by really interesting people. I think there's got to be a human soul at the core of the whole thing.

5:17And it's like that thing that I think if I read a book and thought it was the best book in the world, and then someone told me that the author who'd written it was actually AI, it kind of takes away the point of the whole thing and I just feel like that feels like a waste of time and I do think you can write through it and I think you can design through it and I think obviously you can use it as a tool for things but if you use it well I think it will it will change things in the right way it's like I think the thing that you have to kind of I think the thing will change a lot that's the point I was trying to get to the thing that will change a lot is um clickbait type stuff so we don't kind of get involved in that and you don't get involved in that and it's i don't think the design industry gets involved in it particularly but you do get some publications in the business side that do clickbait type stuff will be a lot harder to find because people aren't scrolling endlessly through socials and still endlessly through that they're looking at chat gpt to find out what's going on which means you don't you don't get those click throughs to that sort of clickbaity headlines as much i think that's going to shift massively over the next year or two

6:25Katy Cowan:it's already happening you can see um was it the new york new york times that said that it search traffic had dropped by 50 percent was it 50 percent i think it was i think it was 50 you don't quote me on that i'll have to sort of um fact check after the uh conversation but yeah there was there was lots of reports of it earlier this year just saying how it is massively impacting traditional media uh yeah because we we a lot of us aren't searching Google anymore for answers. Yeah, absolutely. It's that zero clicks, zero clicks marketing where I could be looking for a new Mac. And instead of going through Amazon and John Lewis and looking all over the internet, looking at Google and looking at reviews, ChatGPT does it all for me.

7:10So I don't encounter any of the brands and go straight to the one I want on Apple's website.

7:16Katy Cowan:Yeah, absolutely. I've been doing that as well. Like I was in the market for an air fryer i'm as per usual three years rebelliously behind um and i still haven't got one well we still haven't we have we still haven't you know hit the button but we're just we were just asking chat gpt what you know if we have this much space and this is what i love about it if we've got this much space and there's the two of us and this is what we cook what air fryer would you recommend you can't ask google that well you can the ai version now which they've just recently launched in the last month or so but yeah um yeah it's it's incredible yeah that's it you get really specific the holiday we've just been on in france that's exactly what i found this place in the south of france by putting in so many parameters including comfortable beds because i'm quite old now i love that and it has to be fabulous and it has to have wine needs to have a pool needs to be by yeah nice vineyards and but it came up with a thing that It was like spot on and way cheaper than anything I could find.

8:19Wow. That's incredible. But it is that. So losing the clicks, I think the media will change from, which I think is a really good thing because the whole clickbait thing tends to be total rubbish. So I think people will really focus on their audiences and getting a subscriber base in and, you know, really connecting with people rather than offhand comments.

8:43Katy Cowan:Yeah, I think it's completely shifting PR and marketing, isn't it? And how we get found by people. And what's quite interesting is I, as you know, have been changing how we do Creative Boom. It's kind of come full circle without going too much into it, but I think it might be a good example. Massively, the studio things that you're doing. Oh, it's so good. Really good. They're so lovely. But we started Creative Boom in 2009 when Twitter was amazing and it was friendly and we built up a community on there. And that's how we got going, really. That's how Creative Boom became a success and became known.

9:21Katy Cowan:But then, you know, without going into the details of what's happened since then. And it was like somebody said to me a while ago, where can I sign up to Creative Boom? Where can I become a member? And I was like, well, we're on Twitter, we're on Instagram. And obviously things were starting to change. The algorithms were dictating what could be seen in front of people. And that was another thing us PR and marketing and media platforms had to deal with. and I thought in February well I think it's about time we owned our own community and brought it onto our own private space where we're in control and we dictate what happens next and so that's what we did and I started to see that happening elsewhere as well I felt like there was a shift but it's all happened in the last 12 months I would say yeah it's like this year I mean I love the fact that you actually thought it and then did it and it's now successful I was in my pajamas I was eating granola.

10:16I was like, I wonder if this will work.

10:18Katy Cowan:Best ideas come that way. Yeah. Honestly, the amount of people I talk to who are held back by the fear of something not working, just do it. Massively. Definitely. What's the worst thing that can happen? It doesn't work out. At least you tried. Yeah, completely. No, you're completely right. And I completely agree with you, but I still have that sort of vague thing myself of thinking, ugh. Oh, yeah. Because we're always on display, aren't we? yeah i need to push through it oh we do you have to get over the fear so when clients come to you now what are they most worried about that they weren't five years ago um let me have a think what they're most worried about i'm putting you on the spot here i know i like it it's good because the thing is we're all figuring it out as we go along that none of us are experts in this it's just been so fast that yeah it almost feels like the days when social media came in and yes no one knows yeah we were all just figuring it out do you remember when when all these jobs came about social media executive and then some PR agencies pivoted and called themselves social media agencies and it was really interesting yeah completely I think they are most worried about what's the point in speaking to the media in the first place does anyone ever really read anything anymore how am I going to get in front of my clients.

11:37So, okay, when I first started Red Setter, my previous roles had been in working brand design agencies as the head of new business, head of marketing, that kind of thing. And the main way I used to get new clients in would be by phoning someone up and saying, hey, we do this, I love the way you're doing that, arrange in a meeting, and it just worked. Whereas now, I mean, I'm sure there's some people that can still do it well and stuff, But most of the time cold calling doesn't work. You've got to be so much more targeted and clever to reach the minds of your audience. That's how do you find the way through?

12:13The noise just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, doesn't it? So what's going to get people's attention? How do you find new clients?

12:20Katy Cowan:Yeah. How do you do that? So from my point of view, let's use Creative Beam as a case study. From my point of view, what worked really well in the beginning on social media was me being the face of the brand. and the community that was behind it. So everything that we did on the platform, which was a passion project at the time, it still is. It's just now makes money. It's now my full-time job. Yeah, it's great. Which I love. I love it with all my heart. But it worked really well. And then at some point along the line, and this is how much it's changed in 20 years, I thought, right, we need to, if we're going to take this seriously, if we're going to do our community proud, then we need to grow this up.

12:58Katy Cowan:We need to mature it. We need to do things by the book. We need to turn it into a serious publishing platform. Because at the time, do you remember, I used to go on press trips and the journalists would often do, you know, the other journalists. I never did because I'm completely naive. I'm just like, oh, I'll just rock up. It'll be great. But all the other journalists would find out who else is going. And there would always be one, some often, not always the case, but often older woman or man who would just hate me from the off because they'd look me up. and they'd seen that I was a blog and an influencer.

13:33Katy Cowan:Oh my God, that's ridiculous. And so I remember I went to this press trip in the Netherlands. I won't say which city just in case they're listening. But it was so funny when we did the introductions. She was scowling at me the whole time. We went around and then when it got to her time, she said, and I am a serious, serious professional print journalist. oh my god this lovely lad who um I'm still in touch with actually leaned in and said I really don't think she likes you it was so obvious because I was the only one there who was just online um but I I can't remember what my point is but it's just changed so much so I felt right we need to grow up the magazine we need to be taken seriously what we're doing is great we've got influence um obviously it was disrupting traditional media newspapers and i felt so sorry for a lot of my friends who i went to university with who were struggling and and things just disappeared jobs went uh newsrooms shrunk it was you know the last 20 years for publishing has been crazy and of course the knock-on effect definitely has definitely impacted pr are um so i think my long-winded question or point is that it's come full circle again because as you've said how do you cut through the noise how do you differentiate yourself when there's so much slop online and we've got ai i just suddenly had an epiphany we need to go back to our roots we need to have me as the face and our team we need to have the human element and we need to bring the community back into the engine of everything we do which is kind of what we've been doing a little long anyway yeah surely that just will happen the ones that are going to survive surely that's what's going to happen because you can't rely on that sort of click-baity superfluous stuff anymore no so you'll get proper subscription based so that the new york times i was reading about it in new york magazine that's why i was reading about this recently and they were talking about the benefits of like just you're going to have to have subscribers and whether that's paid subscribers or not if people aren't in your community then they're not going to listen to you yeah it's um it's a difficult one for me because creative boom was always free and it was always meant to be accessible and inclusive so i don't sit very comfortably with the whole subscription model it's i'm pushing for the kind of you know sponsorship from from brands and don't forget i'm lean and mean and it's a small team and i'm independent so i don't have people breathing down my neck and demanding profits yeah um so I'm lucky in that respect I can do this passion project for for a living make a decent salary pay people well you know and it's it's a great place to be but gosh if you're a traditional magazine right now and you've been relying on clicks for those kind of you know very kind of you know we all do it we all click on them but they're gone when was the last time you typed anything into google yeah completely yeah typing things into google and just clicking on random stuff i just don't do anywhere near as much anymore which again i do think will improve the quality of things is it a case of the cream rising to the top yeah totally yeah yeah i think you'll get really good quality stuff and people won't put all their money into getting ridiculous headlines they'll actually do some decent, decent stuff behind it.

17:02And there's still a lot of that around.

17:04Katy Cowan:Yeah, yeah. God, yeah. There's, there's a lot of great writing. I love what the New Yorker did. They made that kind of magazine a brand, didn't they? Something that was aspirational. Yeah. Aspirational brand. Definitely. Yeah. There's loads of interesting stuff, but I do think, I mean, it's, it's changing faster now than I feel it's ever have done ever before. But I think it's really exciting. Yeah. I, I'm very positive and optimistic about it as well. I've always enjoyed the disruptive uh nature of our industry and what's next and how do we pivot and how can I make sure I'm you know staying staying up to date with everything um yeah oh my goodness and do you do you use chat gpt and other tools to sort of help you um do that because I find that it's become my little yeah my little mentor my coach my business coach my strategy absolutely yeah I mean I think it'd be crazy not to use it it's so useful if you ask the right really specific questions and you get into the right train of thought it's really really good it's all depends again how you use it doesn't if we used it to write things so we can use it to say well i've got these thoughts on this thing that i'd like to do could you expand that could you give me a framework for this i think that's really good use of use of ai but if we actually used it to write things most of the publications we go to have got ai filters and if you're ever seen to have any sort of if you just send ai stuff over they'll reject it yes you can't send things through to forbes and fasco and creative boom yeah that are just written by chat gpt because you could spot it and there's style and it's not it loses the whole thing so there are pr agencies doing that i'm sure there must be because it's so easy to do like you could you could increase your amount of clients like tenfold couldn't you and just bang stuff out but it's not sustainable and they're not actually going to be around doing that in a year or two are they because everyone can tell it's funny because we go back to the human element what works when you go back to traditional pr what that's always worked throughout time no matter what's happening outside of that realm it's it's the human connection i was always taught by my pr manager make you know make relationships get to know people find out who what their kids are called you know ask them how their holiday in France was you know yeah absolutely yeah completely it makes a big difference doesn't it people want to form connections with people yeah they don't want AI written stuff everywhere and like if you knew a publication even if it had some interest and stuff was completely written by AI you just wouldn't read it no you wouldn't and I think it was sort of going that way anyway there was a lot of clickbait on the web and people were just sick of it you know five five hacks for this and you know we do a little bit of that on creative boom because you know we need to get the the traffic and we need to spark people's curiosity but i would rather call them like five hacks yeah i'd rather call them open loops where we spark curiosity and emotion definitely and get people to think about okay you know like 25 design agencies that you think are the best as voted by the community, which got a ton of traffic, as you can imagine.

20:17Katy Cowan:Yeah, of course. And lots of people going, why aren't we on there? Yeah, I've heard quite a lot of that myself. Well, this is why we ask the community so we can say nothing to do with us. Yeah, it's not my fault. That's, yeah, no, completely. Yeah. But yeah, the AI thing, just because I'm saying that it's going to stop a lot of the sort of sloppy journalism and sloppy PR agencies and stuff like that it's still I use it so much in my life I still probably use it the app I use most on my phone god it probably is that an email just to I don't know buy the right things and go to the right places and even when we're on holiday it's really sad I was just like oh my god we've got I don't know half a day in Avignon what's the best thing to do in three hours then I'm like all right we should do that that and that and then we should go there for lunch and it's really really good imagine it in sort of a couple of years time when it's integrated into everything yeah yeah completely so it won't be like this separate thing it'll just be integrated into your email it'll be into well it's already happening now it's already happening exactly you've got the pilot and all that kind of stuff but it sounds so naive when I talk about AI you know but I kind of surely most people do because there isn't one person that like I listen to so many podcasts about people talking about it and I don't think anyone can have you've just got your opinion on it really haven't you yes you can listen to lots of highbrow stuff and there's plenty of great content around if you really want to dive into what's happening and how things are changing and you can see it from both sides there's a lot of cynics quite rightly and massively optimism about it too um I like to take the optimistic approach I do wonder if there is a bubble that's about to burst because the this whole thing costs a lot of money and they're just they're hemorrhaging cash they're not they're not profitable yet so i do wonder if there's going to be another dot-com bubble moment but where's the internet yeah how can that be exactly how can that be sustainable but look at the internet it's still here isn't it exactly so it'll be of it'll ai will still be around i think it'll just be a different version yeah yeah i completely agree there's got to be something that can reduce the amount of power it takes and go from there yeah but yeah I was listening to Mo Gordat have you ever heard about yes he does I listened to one of his podcasts a couple of weeks ago about he's really not very positive about it at all and thinks it's he thinks it's going to massively nosedive and huge numbers of people are going to lose their jobs and then it's going to sort of go up from there right I think I I think I listened to part of that it was the diary of the ceo one he's done a few with um Dario, the CEO.

22:58Yes. And this most recent one, he was, I think he was head of Google X, wasn't he? And from a tech point of view, I can see how it's happening and I can see how that would happen. Yeah. From a design point of view, actually, I can see how the lower, you can't really just produce sort of low end design anymore. You've got to work your way up the chain to be successful, I suppose, and design.

23:21Katy Cowan:I think there was an article that he wrote as well, or there was an interview along a similar thread. And I think, was it him talking about how like all those kind of junior roles have currently gone? Because if you think about it from a PR agency point of view, if there are PR agencies writing those sort of, you know, you know, the press releases which have to be adjusted and adapted for all the different regions of the UK or whatever. And does anyone do that anymore? Yeah, I don't really do. So they don't get the junior PR executives in. So what the hell are they going to do when they need like more, you know, middle management?

23:57That's it. It's not sustainable, is it? No, it's not.

23:59Katy Cowan:It's a bubble. Yeah, you can make a lot of money out of it, I'm sure, now for the next year or two. But if you haven't got the juniors learning the craft, it's not a sustainable business model. Absolutely. So I think when people talk about jobs going, I think a lot will. But I think it'll also create lots of new opportunities. opportunities um just like any technology that comes along um does you know behaves in that way but I just feel like this is probably the biggest shake-up yeah definitely so how do you see the decline of traditional media shaping the role of PR going forward are we now more like publishers ourselves is everybody a content creator yeah that's a good question I think everyone is a content created to a certain degree but some as always I think it's it's always going to be a very similar situation that some people just get more attention than others you're always going to get influences rising to the top but people are always going to be top news sources at the top as well like I'll always read the BBC and the New York Times and I think I will let something massively shifts but they'll always be like those ones that I just go to as a trusted source of information now this is interesting because i the funny thing is i've started blogging again on my own personal website katiecowen.co.uk have you i have i'll have to check that out i didn't know that but well now this is going to make you laugh after you said that everything i write i look back even just a month later and think oh my god i sound so naive so much has changed since then you feel you feel like you have to put a caveat on every article and say by the way i will probably have changed my mind on all of this in a month's time completely because you're just constantly learning and things are shifting so fast that so I I wrote an article a while ago I think I think it still stands and I was talking about influencers I wasn't being like that grumpy traditional journalist in the Netherlands you've become that older person yeah I was like who do these people think they are where are they making money and I'm not it's not fair yeah maybe a little bit um but yeah we you know me I'm not going to be anything but honest um but yeah I wrote a blog post and I was saying I think you know the the days of influencers is is coming to an end not because the influencers aren't great at what they do they're brilliant but because I think there is a fatigue setting in that people are just so fed up with people going oh here is my amazing life and my amazing flat and my amazing clothes and they were gifted by this brand so it all feels really fake and it doesn't feel real so I think but Gen Z are bringing in.

26:44Katy Cowan:Genuine influencers yeah I think genuine influencers will be the ones that I don't know people that have been paid god knows how many hundreds of thousands of pounds by a company to promote stuff or to do all that kind of stuff I think will fade because people see through it I think I was talking to I did a a wine tour at the weekend, a tour of Sussex vineyards, which was really, really fun. And there was a wine writer on it who was super lovely. And she was saying to me that, so she's probably about my age now. She's sort of like late 40s. And she's saying her and her friends are kind of looking at the generation below that are all coming through and are starting to get really good gigs writing for the Guardian, for the wine section of the Guardian, stuff like that.

27:25And it's no longer good enough. she's like it kind of it's completely derailed her way of thinking because it's no longer good enough for her just to be a really good wine writer she's now got to have the social channel and she's got to have all the contacts and she's got to be a place that people go to for information whereas in the past she just wrote really good articles and said it's it's turned into like you've got to have a whole lifestyle to go with it it's incredible yeah she wasn't actually moaning about it she was kind of saying it's really interesting like do i shift do i not shift Is it just something new?

27:55Can we exist together? It's, yeah.

27:59Katy Cowan:It's so interesting spending a couple of, you know, not hours, but half an hour on TikTok and looking through the content and what people are sharing now. Yeah. I was sat in my hairdresser and there's a lovely girl in there. She's called Jessica. She's one of the junior staff. And when she's sort of washing my hair or making me a cup of tea, I always talk to her about TikTok and tell her what I'm doing with Creative Boom. and she says yeah that's good that's nice content looks nice but just be more natural just like just start recording and just don't even edit it and just start talking um and she's like these graphics are really nice but just make it scrappy just don't worry about all that a bit overdone almost of like you need to be like look you've just jumped on the camera and got out of bed and done it well i'm in i'm in our generation where we we grew up thinking oh everything has to be stylized and curated and we've got yeah well there's obviously got to be a strategy behind everything but we've got to we've got to do this we've got to do that um so to get yourself out of that thinking and mindset it takes a while I mean I look at some of the videos I tried to do last year and they were just so clunky and awkward and um staged really I love your style now I think what you're doing is really really good well it's because I don't give two monkeys to be honest I'm just that's the way you've got to be isn't it I think I think so you've just got to be genuine you've just got to be yourself um I think the realization that because there is so much content out there and so many people are doing this you you sit back and you go if you if you sort of try and strategize your your persona online it's just not gonna work you're just gonna sound like everybody else so I thought yeah I'm just gonna be me I'm just gonna warts and all all the daftness all the silliness just gonna have fun and it's actually a joy to be now at this stage after what we what would you say 15 years of this gradual climb to where we were and now actually one of the things I'm thankful for with AI is that we get to have a bit more kind of punk again yeah totally yeah yeah that's true I was talking to friends about that the weekend of um she was worried it's going to be the downfall of all of us that it's going to be absolutely terrible and I was just like this I can totally see the concerns I get it but there's also an argument that it could definitely just it democratizes everyone so everyone's got access to the same tools and everyone's got me not the same tools but businesses can start quickly and get there more quickly and it kind of it levels things up a little bit yeah hopefully we'll see gives everyone a chance um yeah yeah it's like having a little brainstorming team in your pocket isn't it it's yeah incredible I used to I used to get in touch with my old PR um director um and say to him oh I've got this campaign I'm gonna do for a client I need some ideas I can't think of anything my brain's just like because I'm doing all these different things at once what do you think we should come up with he would give me ideas now I'm sending him the ideas for a laugh that AI spits out and he's like this isn't he's just signed up actually this is incredible he's retired but he's just signed up so he can play with it he just thinks it's amazing

31:22Katy Cowan:this season is brought to you by James Cropper a mill that's been shaping color and creativity from the heart of the Lake District since 1845 their new color source range lets you choose from 50 shades in different weights and textures straight from the source stunning paper made by craftspeople who live among the mountains that inspire their colors explore the full range at paperandpackaging.jamescropper.com so niche platforms and creators if they've replaced the authority that big media outlets once had and maybe that's too bold a statement yeah is it a different kind of power do you think Do you think they have replaced it?

32:05No, I don't think they have replaced it. But I think the big platforms will always be there and the big authority, the news authorities and stuff, that will always be there. But they've definitely added in. But then, I mean, it's hard to argue. It's so big, isn't it? It's hard to argue. You go back to classic examples like Brexit and stuff like that. If you look at how people were reached and communicated with through social, and this is before AI and anything like that, or kind of before the way it's used right now, it's what's my point hold on i have to go back to that it's because you know what it's because

32:40Katy Cowan:our brains have just been so you know overwhelmed by all this shift it's what's believable isn't it what's the truth yes it goes back to that believe yeah hence the brexit reference i knew i'd get there in the end but yeah what's believable what's the truth what's the how can you how can you rely and things how can you believe what's going on anymore and some people I still think there's a massive place for what's been there in the past I think that surely there's got to be other other things coming through like what you're trying to do with creative boom what you are doing with creative boom of becoming a really trusted source of information surely there's got to be other things like that I always think there should be like a new national newspaper started up that would be great yeah that isn't run by all the big media moguls and stuff like that that isn't sort of correct I know they're not all like that but just something yeah something completely new and refreshing that I'd like to read yeah it's something neutral and maybe just a bit more critical um yeah totally it's tough though isn't it because like journalism has gone through it has gone through a hell of a lot yeah you know and the advertisers are elsewhere google and facebook took up all the the kind of money didn't it and uh didn't they rather and um and left lots of platforms thinking good grief and even now like the guardian still has its sort of campaign to get you to sign up and support great journalism yeah true when did they start that that was back in like 2010 maybe was it or was it earlier than that long ago maybe it was it's as long as i can remember with the guardian app well this is how old I am I graduated in 2000 and in our final year of university bearing in mind we were the first um course to use um digital um kind of tools for editing and recording and and all the rest of it prior to that you had to use tape and you had to cut the tape and stick it back together again for for broadcast journalism oh my god that seems crazy now doesn't it?

34:47Katy Cowan:It's a, it doesn't feel like a very long time ago. That's, that's what's crazy about it. But the final year, you could either go into print, broadcast or online. And there were about 10 people who went into online and all of us print and broadcast journalists were just mocking them because at that time we were just using Google to search for naked men and doing, doing things that 18 year olds do. Me and a few girls. I think I was one of the only ones who had internet in my bedroom. We were the first year to get internet accessing our doors. Yeah, I definitely didn't have internet. I graduated in 97 and I definitely didn't have internet in my, I don't think we had internet.

35:26Must have had it in the house. I can't remember. Must have done.

35:30Katy Cowan:Dial up when you had to go in and it would go. Yeah, it was. Yeah, yeah. Total dial up stuff. I think we might have only had it in university. These kids don't know they were born. we are we are old but we look amazing so it's okay that's the main thing absolutely what happened in uh lancaster stays in lancaster northern design festival tales can never come out they can never come out if you're listening northern uh design festival crew there will be a knock on the door if anything is ever revealed anyway so if search and social are changing so fast with AI at the wheel what impact do you think that's going to have on how stories get discovered in future is it about like if you had somebody come to you with a campaign you would obviously still try to target some of those larger established credible media yeah of course yeah I think it's just about mixing it up including I think it's it's always got to start with the audience so rather than you can get so confused by looking at the media landscape and what's going on and we're seeing what if you look at the audience and look at who's going to be interested in what they're talking about in the first place who are they trying to reach how do these people get their information then that's that's where you go it's i think that's always going to be the case and that the where you go will change but generally i mean still the business press and the main sources of the business press getting our clients into that sort of like Forbes, Fasco, FT, all that kind of stuff is always going to be, always going to be as much as you can say that for the foreseeable future, super important.

37:13It gives me hope. Yeah, it's putting design in a place that it's talking about it as a proper business tool and it's hopefully changing people's opinions on, maybe if anyone doesn't have the opinion that design can be a really effective business tool, get it in those places in front of business people and they can see that yeah pretty unarguable absolutely um did you see that linkedin

37:40Katy Cowan:the other day has um changed the algorithm a little bit to favor instead real deep and meaningful conversation oh has it no i missed this that's interesting it was actually a press release that came through that somebody sent they were like asking do you want us to do a thought piece on this and I was like that's really interesting because the things that I found that work really well on there for us are the kind of human-led stories yeah and and having more of a kind of face oh massively things um and I think they're really leaning into that now because of all the AI slop because you know when people have written their updates on there using chat GPT you know what yes Yes, I completely agree with you.